Hi all, i'm trying to get my head around orient attribute, and how to create and use one. And it seems to work nice, until i'm trying to use it with objects that have local translation, i.e. they are not at the center of the world.

If you look at the attached file, teapot_1 has no translation and it is copied where i expected it to be, grid corners/points. But if i use teapot_2, whic have local translation, the result is off as much as the source object is off from the origin.

Is there a way to get around this kind of situation, or is that just another Houdini gotcha…or am i creating the orient attribute totally wrong

Cheers
-k

this has nothing specific to do with orient (also in your example you will not see any difference if you dont create the orient)

Copy SOP will always copy the source reometry onto the destination point relative to its transform to the origin, would you expect different behavior?

Hi Tomas, i guess i kinda was expecting it to place it into template (= grrid) points in both cases. But if this is the way, it just means that when using Copy to points, my source geometry needs to be always in origin. Or, i need to store the sorce geo offset and apply it after Copy to points.

-k

right

that's the correct way, cause it's very easy to make sure your geo is in correct relation to the origin

it would be very frustrating if it always placed the geo to the point using geo's centroid for example

If you need to keep your source geometry where it is at because it will be used in your final scene or at some other stage, but you also want to use it as a source for your copy to points,

Just create a new ‘branch’. You can add a transform node after your source geometry and in the transform node click on “Move Centroid to Origin” button and use that for your copy to points. The benefit of that is you can now make adjustments of that new geometry source stream and not affect your original off world center origin geometry. Sometimes even the centroid at world center is not always ideal or desired, e.g. doing a copy from the edge of a circle instead of center, or non asymmetrical geo.